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Monday, April 30, 2012

The Matthew Owens Beating

Last week a white Mobile man was beaten to near death by about 20 blacks. As reported by the Daily Caller, several witnesses heard one voice yell "Now that’s justice for Trayvon." Naturally, a lot of folks suspected that the attacks were motivated by both racial and Trayvon-related tensions. After all, there is a precedent for this sort of thing - ask Reginald Denny. Other reports said there may have been an altercation over a pick-up basketball game in the street.

But initial appearances can be deceiving. As the evidence rolled in, we learn the real story - see the Daily Caller link:

Ashley Parker, whose brother Matthew Owens is clinging to life after the assault, said Owens was attacked after her 21-year-old daughter witnessed a group of African-American youth moving from yard to yard in the neighborhood and taking something that didn’t belong to them. She told Owens, who confronted the youths.
She “saw one of them take something off a porch,” Parker said, “and that is when Matthew approached them and told them they need to go home.”
The group returned with more than a dozen others, she said, beating Owens with bats, brass knuckles, a chair, a paint can and other objects. The attack left him bloodied and unconscious.So, it was all about a guy confronting burglars and getting gang-assaulted for it. Anything else to see here?

Yes - the Trayvon remark. If the Trayvon case was irrelevant to this attack, why does that one thug's outburst matter? Because it's relevant to public reaction to the attack. The media and certain political leaders have gone to great lengths to (wittingly or unwittingly) set the stage for a replay of the Los Angeles Riots. A thug yells "Trayvon," and to some it looked like those chickens are already starting to come home to roost. It's not a bad thing to worry about a reasonably probable event - it is a bad thing to think that eve event has already happened when it hasn't. The Trayvon case has not yet claimed its first Reginald Denny - or worse, a Yankel Rosenbaum.
Something else disturbs me: that the "justice for Trayvon" meme may enter (or may already be entering) the black thug community. I can imagine thugs of any ethnicity invoking the outrage-du-jour against one of "their people" as a sort of battle cry. If we start seeing more instances of violent criminals shouting "justice for Trayvon," that will influence some to suspect that Los Angeles Riots Redux is closer than it really is. Worse, there are some leftists who will feel natural sympathy for ANYONE who exclaims "justice for Trayvon," even if that person is in the process of committing a serious crime. We know who they are - they're the same leftists who excused the many crimes associated with Occupy Wall Street. Some of them were among the yammering class at the time of the Denny beating, and I'll bet many of them saw no problem with Damian Williams' mere 10-year sentence for his role in that crime.